With the transition to virtualized infrastructure in recent years, outages due to configuration changes to applications have been on the rise. Some of the more common configuration changes include code push, and changes to the clustering configuration, number of threads allocated to applications, and datastore configuration. Although many of these changes are tested prior to rolling them out in the production environment, outages and significant performance degradations are not discovered, indeed cannot be discovered, if they result from scale issues, e.g., when the changes are rolled out in a cloud environment having virtual machines that number in the thousands.
Approaches for tracking configuration changes and correlating performance degradations to specific, application-related changes are disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2013/0332430, entitled “Tracking Changes that Affect Performance of Deployed Applications,” and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2013/0332594, entitled “Correlating Performance Degradation of Applications to Specific Changes Made to Applications,” which are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties. However, these approaches require human input to identify configuration changes and remedy performance degradation.